Myth and Carnival in Robert Coover's The Public Burning - aisna

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8 Dainottosuppressed "accounts," a mere part of the genesis of writing, butallusions meant to be recognized—signs in the finished work that itsoriginality, organization and continuing life depend on a suggestive"negative capability" (what Harold Bloom calls" strong imagination")that manipulates and changes a preexistent literary and social order oflanguage. Fiction becomes an imaginary topos that stages the fundamentalantagonism on which social myths are structured.However, what is the social significance of this Keatsean negativecapability in the face of myth? Coover seems to believe in thefundamental similarity of myth and ideology. What myth does is tocreate a comprehensive, stable, and totalitarian interpretation ofnothing less than everything. Myth is the totalitarian speech of UncleSam:The untransacted destiny of the American people is to establish a neworder in human affairs, to confirm the destiny of the human race, and topull that switch and shed a new and resplendent glory upon mankind.Men's hopes call upon us to say what we will do—who shall live up tothe great trust? (PB 496-7)The paradoxical functioning of "the American people," the"human race" and "mankind" can be detected through an analysis ofsuch statements. Uncle Sam's propositions cannot be falsified becausebehind the form of an observation of a fact, we have a circulardefinition of "the people," "human race," and "mankind": in UncleSam's universe, belief in the (Mormon) myth of America's "mission" tocreate a "new world order" (to echo President Bush's speech on theGulf War, which echoed Goebbel's discourse on the mission of NaziGermany) is rigidly designated by the terms "humanity," "mankind,"and "the American people." 2 That is why the only real members of thehuman race and the People are those who believe in the myth, whereasthose who work against its rule are automatically excluded from theserigid categories—just like the Rosenbergs. Myth demands belief.Moreover, myth demands sacrifice. At the very moment that a group ofindividuals suspends its belief in it, myth must reconstitute the"meaningfulness" of its rigid denominators by ritualistically purifyingthe body of the People from any subversive agency.Coover's definition of myth would then be: a ritualistic fictional
RSA Journal 39order, hypostatized as totalitarian ideology, that structures languageand society through the continuous and spectacular suppression ofdifference (the "other plot" of the Rosenbergs). A myth is born as afiction, but its fictional nature is soon forgotten. Forgetfulness posesthe ultimate threat to human lives. The essence of Myth is itsspectacular staging of ritualistic sacrifices—it is, so to speak, theconsumption of difference by fire, which achieves the final reconstitutionof the unity of the social (and literary) body in its ultimatemeaningfulness.Although Coover constantly denounces the tendency to mythifyfictions, nonetheless he is well aware of humanity's basic fear of chaos,In The Public Burning, Richard Nixon tells us that fictions are necessary"to transcend the confusions" (PB 234). Nixon's own struggle to solvethe confusion over the Rosenberg case becomes a metafictional allegoryof the human need for fictions:Raw data is paralyzing, a nightmare, there's too much of it and man'smind is quickly engulfed by it. Poetry is the art of subordinating facts tothe imagination, of giving them shape and visibility... objectivity is animpossible illusion, a "fantastic claim"... and as an ideal perhaps evenimmoral, that only through the frankly biased and distorting lens of artis any real grasp of the facts—not to mention Ultimate Truth—evenremotely possible. (PB 320)The "fire" of poetic imagination reduces the paralyzing complexity of"raw" data and "cooks" them, reducing them down to organizedmeaningful units. Yet, the relationship that fiction bears to knowledgebrings us eventually back to Kermode's notion of "myth" as absoluteand all-encompassing epistemology and to Bakhtin's suggestion that"when the novel becomes the dominant genre, epistemology becomesthe dominant discipline" (Bakhtin 132). To put things differently, ifthere exists a "human need for pattern, and language's propensity,willy-nilly, for supplying it" (Coover 1983, 68), the fiction-makercannot abdicate his/her role of storytelling, since the fictional model isthe only speculative paradigm for human understanding and theordering of chaos. However, the "artist" must seek new narrativeforms, different from the classical novel (omniscient, linear, regulativeof a notion of reality...), forms which flaunt their own condition of
Page 1 and 2: ROBERTO MARIA DAINOTTOMyth and Carn
Page 3: RSA Journal 37fire purifies everyth
Page 7 and 8: RSA Journal 311matter, The New York
Page 9 and 10: RSA Journal 313Scenery, perspective
Page 11 and 12: RSA Journal 315"policing power [and
Page 13 and 14: RSA Journal 317Superhero Uncle Sam
Page 15 and 16: RSA Journal 319Ages" (PB 58). In a
Page 17 and 18: RSA Journal 321so she burns—and b

Myth and Carnival in Robert Coover's The Public Burning - aisna

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